Bouquet

Somthing of a canned post for you today, as we prepare to spend the day travelling home.  I did this "Bouquet" block from the Farmer's Wife quilt a few days before we left.

It's a little more complicated than a simple 16-patch grid, but it starts out that way.  Since I didn't want to try to cut those parallellograms that form the bouquet, I decided to do that part of the block with paper piecing.  So I drew a 6" square using graph paper, marked the registration lines that form the base grid (at 1.5", 3", and 4.5"), and drew the block.  You can see that the points of the bouquet pieces touch the 1.5" and 4.5" lines.  I cut the 4 segments of the bouquet apart, then pieced them using the paper-piecing method. Then I sewed the 4 bouquet pieces together, making sure to keep the points of the paper blocks aligned. 

The rest of the block I did with conventional (well, modern conventional) rotary cutting and piecing: the large gold triangle started as a 3 7/8" square, cut diagonally.  The two side rectangles were cut 5"x2".  The small HST was from two 2 3/8" squares.

Yesterday we ended up getting in to the hotel very late, because we spent a lot of time at the Reagan Library which has a fantastic museum, and then got stuck in massive traffic around Santa Barbara.  Today is Quarta's 9th birthday and we're celebrating with a quick stop at the Jelly Belly factory (even though we bought some at the Reagan Library) and then driving all day to get home in time for Steve to play piano at church tomorrow.